Fall 2022 Graduate Courses

ENGL 5103 Proseminar

Instructor: Professor Erika Boeckeler
Sequence: Thursday, 1:35-4:50 PM

Introduces the history and current scholarly practices of English studies. Surveys theoretical, methodological, and institutional issues in the development of the discipline; introduces students to the research of the English department’s graduate faculty; and offers opportunities for the practice of key components of scholarly production, including formulating research questions, using databases, conducting literature reviews, and writing and presenting scholarship in common formats other than the long research paper, such as conference proposals, oral presentations, and book reviews.

ENGL 7370 Introduction to Digital Humanities

Instructor: Professor Julia Flanders
Sequence: Wednesday, 11:20 AM-2:40 PM

Offers a critical orientation to the tools, methods, and intellectual history of the digital humanities (DH). Explores key questions such as what debates are (re)shaping DH in this moment; what central theories lead humanities scholars to experiment with computational, geospatial, and network methodologies; how visualization can illuminate literature, history, writing, and other humanities subjects; and how new modes of research and publication might influence our teaching. Balances theory and praxis: Successful students come away with a well-grounded understanding of the DH field and a set of foundational skills to support their future research. No prior technical expertise is required to take the course, but students should be willing to experiment with new skills.

WMNS 6100 Theorizing Gender and Sexuality

Instructor: Professor Carla Kaplan
Sequence: Tuesday, 3:25-6:45 PM

Seeks to challenge and expand our understanding of the relationship between biological sex; gendered identities; and sexual “preferences,” practices, and life ways. This interdisciplinary course offers debates around sex, gender, sexuality, and the body that push beyond binary models reliant on a simple “nature/culture” distinction. Focuses on dynamic and variable aspects of sexuality, sex, and gender within and across cultures, representational forms, and historical periods, analyzing the circumstances in which they undergo significant challenge or transformation. Uses particular paradigmatic “case studies” to push hard at the boundaries of sex and gender and to dialogue around contesting conceptualizations of “the body,” “sex,” and “gender,” particularly as they circulate in specific discourses of feminism, queer theory, and poststructuralism; ethnic studies; critical race theory; and cultural studies.

ENGL 7281 Topics in Medieval Literature: Afterlives of the Middle Ages

Instructor: Professor Kathleen Kelly
Sequence: Monday, 5:00-8:20 PM

The pointing finger on your computer screen. The gothic spires punctuating the American skyline. The landscape of many a video game. The US Marine holding a ceremonial sword. These and other residues of the Middle Ages are baked into our everyday lives. The appropriation of the medieval is ubiquitous, and never ideologically innocent, running the gamut from Wagner’s Ring opera to the Med-Ren Faire to Dreamworks’ Shrek to the shields that white supremacists carried in Charlottesville. In this course, our focus is on the persistence of the Middle Ages as a mode and a theme in literature, music, art, and architecture, as well as in film, video games, and other artifacts of popular culture. We will consider such topics as aesthetics, pleasure, danger, canonization, genre, colonialism, the gothic, fantasy literature, and modern responses to medieval representations of class, race, gender, and sexual preference and identity, and pair “host” texts and “symbiont” texts, such as Malory’s Morte Darthur and a selection of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and their reworkings, including film. As we read such texts as the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, the French Tristan and Iseult and Roman de Silence (a tale of born-sex vs. cultural assignment), the Icelandic Vínland Sagas (the tale of the Norse discovery of America), and the West African Sundiata, we will explore how—and why—we read medieval texts now. We will also read a few modern texts that are medievalized in some way, but don’t necessarily derive from any given medieval text (such as James Meek’s To Calais in Ordinary Time [2019]). Students are encouraged to make connections between the medieval and their own areas of interest, and therefore will choose some of the materials for the last part of the course that should lead to final papers. All medieval texts in translation. Requirements: short responses to be read and discussed in class, a class presentation, and a final paper.

ENGL 7266 Victorian Literature

Instructor: Professor Lori Lefkovitz
Sequence: Wednesday, 2:50-6:10 PM

[Description updated on 4/25/22] This seminar will be an introduction to nineteenth-century British literature, texts and contexts, with an emphasis on the long novel, including fiction by the Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and exemplary poetry, with an emphasis on the dramatic monologue. We will explore contemporary Victorian Studies by sampling journals in the field. Students will make seminar presentations, write one short paper, and a final essay that is a draft journal article.

ENGL 7351 Topics in Literary Study: Trauma, Memory, and Contemporary Literature

Instructor: Professor Hillary Chute
Sequence: Monday, 1:35-4:50 PM

This course explores how contemporary literature addresses itself to trauma, and the practice and process of memory.  How does contemporary literature express trauma, and how has it been shaped by it? Across a range of genres—and including works about racism, illness, slavery, the Holocaust, and recent wars—we will examine how literary-artistic form can express, conceptualize, and hold the knowledge of trauma, whether in novels, graphic novels, memoir, poetry, or film. We will also look closely the question of the function and role of memory in literature, thinking about collective and cultural memory, in addition to anchoring ourselves in contemporary theories of trauma and event.  Recent controversial public writing (as by Parul Sehgal on trauma and Philip Gourevitch on the value of memory) will also be considered.  Works may include novels such as Morrison’s Beloved, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, and Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo; graphic novels such as Spiegelman’s Maus, Sacco’s The Fixer, Martínez and Hall’s Wake, and Czerwiec’s Taking Turns; experimental poetry by Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine, and film such as Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour.

ENGL 7360 Topics in Rhetoric: Justice-Oriented Writing Assessment – Antiracist, Decolonial, and Anti-Ableist Approaches to Evaluating Writing

Instructor: Professor Mya Poe
Sequence: Thursday, 5:00-8:20 PM

In the U.S., writing assessment is woven through our lives. In pre-schools, children’s’ development is, in part, traced through their recognition of letters and their pre-literacy abilities. In the K-12 educational system, high-stakes writing assessments are mandated by federal and state governments and are one metric to track school if schools are meeting grade-level learning standards. In colleges, writing assessment is used to track students and measure the “effectiveness” of programs. Teachers and writing center tutors also use writing assessment methods, such as response and self-assessment, to help writers meet their goals. Within workplaces and professional programs, writing assessment is a means to determine qualifications of candidates and determine licensure. Finally, writing assessment has played a role in U.S. immigration policies and colonialism. In short, the assessment of writing is ubiquitous in U.S. culture. While there has long been attention to the injustices of testing, today there is a renewed urgency to challenging and changing unjust writing assessment practices. In this course, we will learn key theoretical ideas about evaluation and learning, explore the histories of use and misuse of writing testing in the U.S., and wrestle with emerging antiracist, decolonial, and anti-ableist approaches to writing assessment. Such justice-oriented frameworks and methods can be applied to the teaching and assessment of writing in any context. Students will be given options for different kinds of projects to fulfill the course requirements. All evaluation in this course will be shared evaluation methods.

ENGL 7395 Topics in Writing: Decolonial Theory and Methods

Instructor: Professor Ellen Cushman
Sequence: Tuesday, 4:20-7:40 PM

In this class, we engage decolonial theory and praxis by taking as our focus rhetorics of difference. We will begin by detecting the ways in which we are constructed as discursive subjects in the colonial matrix of power. What are our privileges as these relate to modern imperial legacies of knowing and being? What are our baselines for normalcy and difference as these relate to modern imperial legacies of knowing and being?

The second part of the course asks us to name and epistemically delink from rhetorics of difference. We will learn to unlearn the ways in which we are written by imperial pasts and presents. In what ways might the consumption and production of rhetorics of difference contribute to sustaining imperial legacies of power? In what ways might we as discursive subjects embody and practice social, linguistic, racial, and epistemic differencing? What is to be done?

The third part of the course introduces decolonial methodology and methods to oppose and unsettle the creation of difference. We will imagine and propose decolonial projects of doing, making, and being as we take up the questions: How can we unsettle the production of difference in our teaching, research, and day-to-day practice of knowing and being? How might we as students, scholars, teachers, and citizens of earth engage in decoloniality and create together pluriversal possibilities?

Finally, we will present the initial results of our praxis projects as we attempt to create alternatives to rhetorics of difference. What projects might we propose to recuperate suppressed epistemologies or to imagine alternatives to the hierarchical structures of everyday life or to help our students learn to unlearn? Assignments will include original scholarship and analyses, presentations, a project proposal and initial results.

ENGL 7266 Victorian Literature

Instructor: Professor Lori Lefkovitz
Sequence: Wednesday, 2:50-6:10 PM
Attributes:

• Counts as an elective towards the Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Treats such topics as Victorian masculinities; female poetic identity; the move to aestheticism and decadence in the latter nineteenth century; and resemblances of the 1890s to our own fin-de-siècle. Considers such figures as R. Browning, E.B. Browning, Christina Rossetti, Florence Nightingale, Swinburne, Pater, Stevenson, Wilde, H.G. Wells, and Freud.

INSH 7910 NULab Project Seminar

Instructor: Professor Julia Flanders
Sequence: Tuesday, 2:30-4:10 PM
Attributes:

• Counts as a Core Requirement for the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities
• Can also count as an elective towards the English MA/PhD degree (does not require GSC petition)

Offers students an opportunity to learn and use digital humanities methods with others in groups and across disciplines in the collaborative space of the NULab seminar. May be repeated up to three times.

ENGL 7370 Introduction to Digital Humanities 

Instructor: Professor Julia Flanders
Sequence: Wednesday, 11:20 AM-2:40 PM
Attributes:

• Counts as a Core Requirement for the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities

Offers a critical orientation to the tools, methods, and intellectual history of the digital humanities (DH). Explores key questions such as what debates are (re)shaping DH in this moment; what central theories lead humanities scholars to experiment with computational, geospatial, and network methodologies; how visualization can illuminate literature, history, writing, and other humanities subjects; and how new modes of research and publication might influence our teaching. Balances theory and praxis: Successful students come away with a well-grounded understanding of the DH field and a set of foundational skills to support their future research. No prior technical expertise is required to take the course, but students should be willing to experiment with new skills.

WMNS 6100 Theorizing Gender and Sexuality

Instructor: Professor Carla Kaplan
Sequence: Tuesday, 3:25-6:45 PM
Attributes:

• Counts as a foundational requirement for the WGSS certificate

Seeks to challenge and expand our understanding of the relationship between biological sex; gendered identities; and sexual “preferences,” practices, and life ways. This interdisciplinary course offers debates around sex, gender, sexuality, and the body that push beyond binary models reliant on a simple “nature/culture” distinction. Focuses on dynamic and variable aspects of sexuality, sex, and gender within and across cultures, representational forms, and historical periods, analyzing the circumstances in which they undergo significant challenge or transformation. Uses particular paradigmatic “case studies” to push hard at the boundaries of sex and gender and to dialogue around contesting conceptualizations of “the body,” “sex,” and “gender,” particularly as they circulate in specific discourses of feminism, queer theory, and poststructuralism; ethnic studies; critical race theory; and cultural studies.

See the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities or Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies catalog pages for complete course lists and certificate information.

Please note:
*Electives must be ENGL courses unless otherwise approved by the Graduate Studies Committee, including electives taken for graduate certificates. Students seeking to take non-ENGL electives in CSSH or through the GCWS Consortium should submit a General Petition Form to the GSC via Heather Hardy, located on the Current Student Resources webpage. GCWS courses also require an additional separate application submitted directly to the Consortium. Core courses taken toward a graduate certificate do not require a petition if the certificate has been formally declared. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to Heather for any questions or clarification.

Proseminar: 

• Not offered in spring. See Fall 2023.

Theories & Methods:

• ENGL 7358 Topics in Literature and Other Disciplines: Public Humanities, Professor Carla Kaplan
• ENGL 7380 Topics in Digital Humanities (Topic TBD), Instructor TBD

Writing & Rhetoric:

• ENGL 7395 Topics in Writing (Topic TBD), Professor Qianqian Zhang-Wu
• ENGL 7392 Writing and the Teaching of Writing, Professor Neal Lerner

Literature Pre-1700:

• See Fall 2023.

Literature 1700-1900:

• ENGL 7352 Topics in Genre: Slave Narrative in a Global Perspective, Professor Nicole Aljoe

Literature Post-1900:

• See Fall 2023.

Electives:

• INSH 7910 NULab Project Seminar, Professor Julia Flanders